Every Sunday during lunchtime in Fort Lee, Vivian Lee takes over her aunt's sushi restaurant Picnic (which is closed on Sundays) and turns it into Viv's, an inventive sandwich shop, where she offers new recipes like her buttermilk fried chicken sandwich with curry mayo and pickled onions on fresh baked pan de mie, a French sandwich roll.

She's created a "pop-up restaurant," a temporary dining establishment often started by budding chefs. In New York and other cities, pop-ups can appear anywhere from rooftops to bars to grocery stores, and attract long lines of food-lovers willing to wait for hours just to participate in this fleeting dining experience.

In Bergen County, it's a different scene. Passersby on Fort Lee's Main Street frequently walk into the shop with quizzical looks on their faces: Wait, isn't this Picnic, the sushi shop?

"People question what I'm doing," said Lee, a 1998 graduate of Fort Lee High School. "I just get confused looks and they walk out. But I love cooking and really love good food. I'm just doing this to get people as excited about different flavors as I am."

A former landscape architect, Lee made a career change in 2008, enrolling in the bread-baking program at Manhattan's International Culinary Institute. "I love that bread is its own living thing because of the yeast, and in some ways you have no control over what you're doing," she said. "In order to be really good at it, you have to spend some time to understand it."

Right out of the program, Lee was hired to be a pastry cook and overnight baker at Danny Meyer's Maialino at the Gramercy Park Hotel. There she honed her bread-baking skills, perfecting a technique called lamination, the layering of butter and dough to make flaky croissants. Trying to improve, she looked to the famed Michelin three-star chef Jiro Ono, of the documentary "Jiro Dreams of Sushi," for inspiration. "Every day I asked how can I do it better," she said.

After her Maialino stint, Lee moved to Boston to work at Cutty's, a gourmet sandwich shop started by a couple who were veterans of the cooking show "America's Test Kitchen." Their inventive sandwiches, like the "Roast Beef 1000" (beef, shallots, sharp cheddar and Thousand Island dressing on a black-pepper brioche bun) have garnered a number of "best of" awards. Working there inspired Lee to rethink the humble sandwich. "I learned about layering flavors and that the placement of ingredients matters," she said.

Last April she moved back in with her parents in Fort Lee, and began to develop recipes, taking traditional American comfort food and adding Asian-inspired flavors. One of her early experiments was a riff on Southern sausage gravy, using Spam and kimchi. "It came out much better than expected, ," she said.

This month, she's been serving a kalbi burger, a riff on Korean short-ribs made with a salty-sweet marinade, served with American cheese and fried kimchi on a potato roll. Other recent selections include a deep-fried hot dog with kimchi slaw and mayo and a chimchurri mushroom sandwich, a grilled portobello mushroom with roasted red peppers, queso de frier (fried cheese) and mayo on a toasted torta roll. No more than four selections are offered each week; sometimes she just makes minor tweaks from week to week, like switching from curry mayo to sriracha mayo.

She'd like to open up her own restaurant eventually, but for now Lee said she's enjoying getting to experiment with recipes and being Bergen County's pop-up pioneer. "It's really funny," she said. "Fort Lee is close to New York, but for some reason the river is a mental or emotional divide."

Every Sunday during lunchtime in Fort Lee, Vivian Lee takes over her aunt's sushi restaurant Picnic (which is closed on Sundays) and turns it into Viv's, an inventive sandwich shop, where she offers new recipes like her buttermilk fried chicken sandwich with curry mayo and pickled onions on fresh baked pan de mie, a French sandwich roll.

She's created a "pop-up restaurant," a temporary dining establishment often started by budding chefs. In New York and other cities, pop-ups can appear anywhere from rooftops to bars to grocery stores, and attract long lines of food-lovers willing to wait for hours just to participate in this fleeting dining experience.

In Bergen County, it's a different scene. Passersby on Fort Lee's Main Street frequently walk into the shop with quizzical looks on their faces: Wait, isn't this Picnic, the sushi shop?

"People question what I'm doing," said Lee, a 1998 graduate of Fort Lee High School. "I just get confused looks and they walk out. But I love cooking and really love good food. I'm just doing this to get people as excited about different flavors as I am."

A former landscape architect, Lee made a career change in 2008, enrolling in the bread-baking program at Manhattan's International Culinary Institute. "I love that bread is its own living thing because of the yeast, and in some ways you have no control over what you're doing," she said. "In order to be really good at it, you have to spend some time to understand it."

Right out of the program, Lee was hired to be a pastry cook and overnight baker at Danny Meyer's Maialino at the Gramercy Park Hotel. There she honed her bread-baking skills, perfecting a technique called lamination, the layering of butter and dough to make flaky croissants. Trying to improve, she looked to the famed Michelin three-star chef Jiro Ono, of the documentary "Jiro Dreams of Sushi," for inspiration. "Every day I asked how can I do it better," she said.

After her Maialino stint, Lee moved to Boston to work at Cutty's, a gourmet sandwich shop started by a couple who were veterans of the cooking show "America's Test Kitchen." Their inventive sandwiches, like the "Roast Beef 1000" (beef, shallots, sharp cheddar and Thousand Island dressing on a black-pepper brioche bun) have garnered a number of "best of" awards. Working there inspired Lee to rethink the humble sandwich. "I learned about layering flavors and that the placement of ingredients matters," she said.

Last April she moved back in with her parents in Fort Lee, and began to develop recipes, taking traditional American comfort food and adding Asian-inspired flavors. One of her early experiments was a riff on Southern sausage gravy, using Spam and kimchi. "It came out much better than expected, ," she said.

This month, she's been serving a kalbi burger, a riff on Korean short-ribs made with a salty-sweet marinade, served with American cheese and fried kimchi on a potato roll. Other recent selections include a deep-fried hot dog with kimchi slaw and mayo and a chimchurri mushroom sandwich, a grilled portobello mushroom with roasted red peppers, queso de frier (fried cheese) and mayo on a toasted torta roll. No more than four selections are offered each week; sometimes she just makes minor tweaks from week to week, like switching from curry mayo to sriracha mayo.

She'd like to open up her own restaurant eventually, but for now Lee said she's enjoying getting to experiment with recipes and being Bergen County's pop-up pioneer. "It's really funny," she said. "Fort Lee is close to New York, but for some reason the river is a mental or emotional divide."